DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that stresses
communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and
IT operations professionals. DevOps responds to the demands of application and
business unit stakeholders for an increased rate of production software
releases. Driven by the adoption of agile development processes by IT
development organizations, DevOps aims to help organizations rapidly produce
quality software products and services.
Although the “Ops” in DevOps is often viewed as the
technical and application management professionals that deploy and manage
applications and their associated infrastructure (e.g., application servers,
web servers, and database servers), the service desk supports the goals of
DevOps in a number of ways. A goal of DevOps is to produce more frequent
software releases. This means the service desk must be prepared to handle a
faster rate of change. One way to ensure the service desk is prepared is to
engage the service desk earlier in the service lifecycle. For example, some
organizations are involving the service desk in testing activities. This
enables the service desk to gain early exposure to releases and also
capitalizes on the service desk’s ability to log and track incidents. In some
organizations, incidents logged during testing are referred to as
pre-production incidents. The service desk can also log problems and known
errors. Although some problems and known errors may be resolved before a
release is moved into production, some may be carried forward into the
production environment. Before the service is even deployed, the service desk
can ensure knowledge articles are in place that enable efficient handling of
those errors when they are encountered. The service desk plays another
invaluable role in that it captures data and about incidents and problems
affecting production systems. This data not only allows the handling of those
incidents and problems, it is also an important part of the feedback loop that enables
the development team to improve the quality of the next release and reduce the
cost of handling errors associated with that release.
DevOps aims to not only improve Ops’s visibility into
development activities, it also aims to improve Dev’s visibility into the
impact of changes on the production environment; particularly during early life
support. ITIL defines early life support (ELS) as the stage in the service
lifecycle that occurs at the end of a deployment and before the service is
fully accepted into operation. During ELS the service desk works closely with
development and deployment teams to ensure incident and problem management
activities are occurring as efficiently and effectively as possible. This
includes using and refining provided diagnostic tools and knowledge resources,
ensuring clear escalation procedures are in place, and capturing and
communicating user and customer complaints.
Key goals of DevOps include better alignment of IT
responsiveness and capabilities to business needs and enabling companies to
gain a competitive advantage by delivering better software, faster. To
contribute to these goals, the service desk must build solid working
relationships with development teams and other IT operations teams.
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